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Anime Expo 2009: The Sky Crawlers
XSEED wastes no time in showing off its latest title.
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Posted on July 4, 2009 at 6:30 pm by Matt Simmons
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While the actual convention may have been a huge dud, XSEED was present to show off playable builds of both "Little Kings Story" and "The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces" on the show floor.
"The Sky Crawlers" is a traditional flight sim game featuring more World War II era type airplanes. The title is based off a novel and film in Japan, but neither have been released in America, so we will be getting a fresh look at the story through the game. "The Sky Crawlers" is developed by the Ace Combat team at Namco-Bandai, so there should be no worries of a sub par product. The first thing to notice is the graphics. When you are watching the game from a distance or the plane is high enough in the sky it looks gorgeous. It makes very good use of colors and textures, however if you fly in low or crash your plane you will see that up close, its nothing to special. This isn't much of a problem since flying 10 feet off the ground isn't a gameplay feature and most of the time you will only see beautiful landscapes.
The controls are perhaps the most odd thing about the title. You hold the Nunchuck in your right hand and the remote in your left. This is assuming your right handed as it is the opposite for left handed players. You use the nunchuck as a flight joystick, tilting and turning the nunchuck without using the joystick for your thumb. You fire the machine gun with the "Z" button. The "C" button will alternate your missle types. Tilting the Wii remote up will make your plane zoom faster and tilting the remote down will make it decrease speed. Holding the "A" Button will lock onto an enemy, and holding it while moving the joystick in any direction will make your plane do a trick such as a somersault and hairpin turn.
An interesting feature in the game is the sort of level system. You will see that some enemy planes have a higher level of maneuverabilty which in turn makes it hard for you to lock onto them and forces you to manually aim. Learning to fly is very natural and I had no problems jumping right into the cockpit. The only real trouble was learning to do the tricks and shooting down higher level planes. The flight sim genre is another series of games that seem like a natural fit on the Wii, yet very few titles have actually been made. XSEED looks to help remedy that situation this Holiday with "The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces".
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